Python: Cut off the last word of a sentence?

Question

What\'s the best way to slice the last word from a block of text?

I can think of

1. Split it to a list (by spaces) and removing the last item, then reco

Answer 1

Actually you don't need to split all words. You can split you text by last space symbol into two parts using rsplit.

Some example:

>>> text = 'Python: Cut of the last word of a sentence?'
>>> text.rsplit(' ', 1)[0]
'Python: Cut of the last word of a'

rsplit is a shorthand for "reverse split", and unlike regular split works from the end of a string. The second parameter is a maximum number of splits to make - e.g. value of 1 will give you two-element list as a result (since there was a single split made, which resulted in two pieces of the input string).